Don't let stammering choose your career

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Stephen

Stephen Martin tells us what changed his mindset about stammering, and uses his career as a financial adviser to prove it doesn't have to hold you back.

When I tell people I am a financial adviser, the reaction is sometimes one of surprise. It is a career built on communication involving client meetings, phone calls and explaining complex things clearly under pressure. On paper, it might look like exactly the wrong fit for someone who stammers.

I used to think that too.

My stammer began in childhood around the age of eight or nine. School was where I felt it most sharply; being asked to read aloud in English class, knowing three sentences ahead that a word was coming that I couldn't get out. Then growing up and the phone carrying a weight that most people never have to think about. The constant, quiet negotiation of getting through a day that other people move through without a second thought.

For a long time, that exhaustion shaped the boundaries of what I thought was available to me.

And it wasn't just the big moments. It was the small ones too. Trying to join in with friends and having what you wanted to say come out differently to how you intended. Ordering food. Answering the register. Introducing yourself. Things that take seconds for most people and take something far more significant out of you. For anyone who stammers, you will know the particular exhaustion of that — the planning, the re-routing, the watching yourself from a distance and willing the words to come.

For a long time, that exhaustion shaped the boundaries of what I thought was available to me. Not consciously. Not as a decision I made out loud. But as a slow, quiet narrowing of possibility — the kind that happens when enough things are hard enough, often enough, for long enough.

The turning point

What changed was mindset. Not quickly, and not easily. But it changed.

I went to university and graduated with a first class honours degree. That mattered to me. Not just as a qualification, but as proof to myself that the stammer was not the measure of my ability. Education had always been something I could hold onto, and I held onto it.

But the deeper change came through two things happening together: counselling and a book called The Chimp Paradox by Professor Steve Peters. What that book gave me was a way of understanding my own thoughts and emotions — not as fixed truths about who I was, but as patterns that could be understood and worked with. It introduced me to the idea of 'mind management': that you can become the person you want to be, not by eliminating the difficult parts of yourself, but by learning to carry them differently.

The career you are drawn to does not belong to people who find communication easy.

Counselling gave me the space to sit with things I had been carrying for a long time and begin to process them honestly. Together, the two shifted something fundamental inside me. It was not a switch being flicked. It was gradual, hard-won, and real.

That was the beginning of acceptance. Not indifference. Not pretending the stammer is not there. But refusing to let it be the thing that decides what is and isn't possible for me.

To anyone reading this at a crossroads

If you stammer and you are wondering whether the career you want is available to you, I want to say this plainly: it is.

I qualified as a financial adviser. I work on the phone daily. I sit with clients in meetings where trust, clarity and patience are everything. None of that is despite my stammer. Some of it, honestly, is because of it.

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The career you are drawn to does not belong to people who find communication easy. It belongs to people who are willing to do the work. And you have already been doing that work your whole life. The preparation, the resilience and the empathy you have built navigating a world not always designed for you — these are not liabilities. They are assets.

Reasonable adjustments exist. Good employers and good working environments exist. And the version of your career that you have been telling yourself might not be for you? That version is available. It just might look a little different to how you imagined, and it might take a different route to get there.

Don't let stammering choose your career. Choose it yourself.

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